Exporting figures from Bokeh as svg or pdf?

Question

Is it possible to output individual figures from Bokeh as pdf or svg images? I feel like I'm missing something obvious, but I've checked the online help pages and gone through the bokeh.objects api and haven't found anything...

Answer 1

There is no way to save PDF currently, but as of Bokeh 0.12.6, it is now possible to export PNG and SVG directly from Python code.

Exporting PNGs looks like this

export_png(plot, filename="plot.png")

And exporting SVGs looks like this

plot.output_backend = "svg"
export_svgs(plot, filename="plot.svg")

There are some optional dependencies that need to be installed. You can find more information in the Exporting Plots section of the User Guide.

Answer 2

In the meantime... as a workaround, until we get a native support, you can use phantom.js to convert the HTML output into a pdf file. We use it in our example testing directory to convert HTML generated plots into png images, but you could also get pdf images:

• https://github.com/ContinuumIO/bokeh/blob/master/examples/test#L217

And more info here:

• http://phantomjs.org/screen-capture.html

Answer 3

It seems that since bokeh uses html5 canvas as a backend, it will be writing things to static html pages. You could always export the html to pdf later.